Faculty & Research

Across the University, Harvard students, scholars, and faculty turn ideas into ventures that solve problems and create value.

A team of Harvard physicists cooled a system made of neutral atoms down a record hundred billion times below room temperature, creating what Faculty of Arts and Sciences professor Markus Greiner calls “the most pristine artificial quantum system ever.” In so doing, the researchers have made it possible to simulate materials in ways that normal computers can’t.

Doug Melton’s life irrevocably changed the day his son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Now, more than 30 years later, the Harvard molecular biologist and his colleagues are within sight of a new treatment that uses stem cells to make healthy insulin-producing cells that can be transplanted into patients.

The virtual quiz game Tango, developed at Harvard, pairs Democrats and Republicans on common teams, where bipartisanship quickly emerges as a competitive advantage. The results showed decreased negative partisanship, increased warmth, and even financial generosity between U.S. players from opposing parties.

Technologies developed by Harvard's David Liu have led to two remarkable medical breakthroughs: a personalized treatment that saved a baby with a fatal genetic disorder and the first successful application of prime editing for a rare immune disease.

GLP-1 has transformed the treatment of obesity, diabetes, and cardiometabolic disorders that affect more than a billion people worldwide. But when Harvard researcher Joel Habener set up an experiment that helped lead to the discovery of the hormone more than three decades ago, this outcome was far from clear.

At Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, ecologists are studying the effects of climate change on the landscape—and seeing the damage in real time. The 4,000-acre forest and its trove of collected data, which attract researchers from around the globe, is a true labor of love for the faculty who work there and key to understanding what a warming world means for nature—and for humans.

The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability announced a sixth round of seed grant awards for work on understudied and emerging topics in climate and sustainability. Among other things, Harvard researchers will examine chocolate production in a changing climate, new materials to harvest moisture, and Kazakhstan's green transition.

As a promising alternative to existing carbon capture technologies, researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have developed carbon capture systems that use molecules called quinones, dissolved in water, as their capturing compounds.

With funding from the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, new interdisciplinary research teams of Harvard faculty are taking on two of the biggest sources of planet-heating emissions: buildings and transportation. Combined, these account for over half the world’s carbon pollution.